The Most Important Skill

I really cannot believe that over one quarter of the school year has passed! I think that the most important skill I've learned so far has got to be analyzing things.

 When we corrected other students' papers in middle school, we mostly just looked for spelling mistakes, grammar mistakes, made sure the paper made sense, and fell under what we believe sounded like a "smart" paper. We also would read stories and poems, but we didn't really go over symbolic meaning, but more the literal meaning. We definitely didn't talk about theme and tone.

 This year I can read another students paper and can analyze it for DIDILS and TWIST. I can also read a passage or poem and find different meanings and found that there are many different ways to interpret things. More specifically, I learned this when analyzing and writing To Kill a Mockingbird papers. Also, when we had The Knife, "Lobsters", and "Shoulders", where we had to annotate, write statements, write questions, write theses, and have discussions.

I believe this is a great skill because not only can we help each other write better papers, but we can understand ourselves how to make our own papers more meaningful and learn from other students' papers. I feel much more confident writing papers even in this short amount of time and I can only imagine how amazing our papers will be by the end of the year!

In the future, we will be able to read a magazine, a newspaper, a book, anything and will be much more insightful and understand what we are reading better. I believe this is also a good qualification for many jobs and something important to know, unlike other crazy things we learn in school!